NEW HIGH-TECH CRIME LAB OPENS

Andrew Martin, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Fred Inbau opened the Chicago Police Department's first crime lab at a time when bullets were test-fired into a wooden box stuffed with cotton and fingerprints were compared with a crude microscope or a magnifying glass. Inbau's specialty was a then-revolutionary device called the polygraph machine.

That was in 1938.

On Monday--nearly 60 years later--Inbau was given a personal tour of the new Illinois State Police Forensic Science Center, a $30 million crime lab with equipment that can lift fingerprints with lasers, pull DNA off a postage stamp and send digitized images of bullets around the world.

Afterward, Inbau, now 87, said he was awed by the new technology. "There's such an extreme as to what we had then and what they have today," said Inbau, who retired from the crime lab in 1941 and spent the next three decades practicing law and teaching at Northwestern University's law school. "There's no comparison. . . . We made good use of what we had available, but we had no inkling of things like DNA."

The 85,000-square-foot crime lab replaces a cramped and antiquated facility on the fifth floor of Chicago Police Headquarters, 1121 S. State St. It is one of eight state-operated crime labs in Illinois and will cost about $18 million a year to operate.

With more than 200 employees, the lab is expected to handle about 75,000 cases per year, mostly from Chicago and other Cook County police agencies.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gov. Jim Edgar called the facility an "important new asset and resource in our fight against crime in Illinois."

"This lab will give us the state-of-the-art here in Cook County," he said. "It will allow us to speed up the processing of evidence, and it will allow police to work through a backlog that has developed over the years."

The crime lab, at 1941 W. Roosevelt Rd., represents the growing importance of science and technology in law enforcement, an institution that has traditionally clung to time-tested, gumshoe methods of investigation. In the last decade, however, some police departments have embraced sophisticated tools like electron microscopes and infrared spectrophotometers to solve crimes.

Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensic science professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said DNA analysis has provided police with the most "ground-breaking" investigative tool since fingerprinting. Developed just 11 years ago, it allows police to identify suspects through bodily fluids, from saliva on a postage stamp to drops of semen or blood on clothing.

Computers, meanwhile, vastly have improved the analytical skills of forensic scientists, Kobilinsky said. Using the new technology, lab technicians can quickly differentiate baking soda from cocaine and determine if two shell casings were fired from the same gun.

"A lot of these technological advances don't solve crimes," said Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman in Washington. "They just provide leads where there otherwise might not be any."

The Forensic Science Center, with its sterile white labs and brightly lit corridors, looks more like a hospital than a police facility. Although the official opening was Monday, the center accepted its first case in July and has been handling about 1,400 cases a week ever since.

The center's firearm section includes a firing range where bullets are fired into water tanks, so they aren't damaged on impact, and equipment that can determine the distance from which shots were fired.

Detailed computer images of bullets and shell casings also can be sent via computer modem to other police agencies to determine if the same gun was used in other crimes. Using this system, the crime lab recently determined that the same gun was used in shootings in Chicago, Joliet and Elgin, a crucial clue for detectives, officials there said.

A similar system is used for fingerprints. Once a fingerprint is gathered, using methods from traditional dusting methods to lasers, it can be compared with 25 million others through a nationwide computer database.

Electron microscopes can magnify particles, from gunpower specks to traces of hair or carpet fiber, up to 100,000 times, while infrared and ultraviolet lights are used to scan documents for forgeries and fabrications.

As impressive as the new technology is, officials at the Forensic Science Center were embarrassed during the ceremony by an untimely power outage on the Near West Side that darkened the facility in the middle of Edgar's speech.